Contra Trump

畫地為牢

Rhyming Chaos is a podcast produced by Jeremy Goldkorn. It ‘comprises interviews with people who have lived through or studied periods of great change, upheaval, chaos, and authoritarian takeover.’

How to commit a self-coup, in the U.S. and in China, the first episode of Rhyming Chaos, was a discussion of what recent Chinese history can teach us about the Musk-Trump power grab. We included it as a chapter in Contra Trump. Below we feature an edited transcript of another episode of Rhyming Chaos in which Jeremy discusses the influence of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on Donald Trump’s MAGA regime with Miklós Haraszti, a Hungarian thinker, political activist and the author of The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism.

I was introduced to The Velvet Prison in early 1987 by Simon Leys shortly after I had spent a year investigating China’s own burgeoning velvet prison. At the time, Leys observed that

When totalitarian thought control reaches its perfection, institutional censorship becomes obsolete. Miklós Haraszti analyzes this paradox with disturbing wit. His essay confirms that Eastern European dissidents are the boldest political explorers of our time: They are charting the topography of a grim new world which we may well be condemned to inhabit tomorrow if we neglect to read them today.

My travels in China from 1979 contributed to Seeds of Fire: Chinese voices of conscience, a collection of literature, art and works of protest edited with John Minford and published in Hong Kong in the autumn of 1986. When we released an expanded edition of Seeds under the aegis of Steve Wasserman, the New York publisher of Haraszti’s work, we added a chapter that was directly inspired by The Velvet Prison under the title ‘Pressure Points’.

[Note: For more on the subject, see:

• 社會主義的“ 軟禁文化”;
• Less Velvet, More Prison;
• Elephants & Anacondas; and,
• When the Anaconda is the Chandelier.]

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As Leys observed, Eastern European dissidents were long ago ‘charting the topography of a grim new world which we may well be condemned to inhabit tomorrow’. In 2025, for people in Trump’s America that tomorrow has finally arrived.

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My thanks to Jeremy Goldkorn to reproduce his conversation with Miklós Haraszti here.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
16 April 2025

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Jeremy Goldkorn 金玉米:

• Rhyming Chaos podcast and newsletter
• The China Week newsletter
• Editorial fellow at ChinaFile
• Other links

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Falsified Democracy in Hungary and America

Jeremy Goldkorn in conversation with Miklós Haraszti

Mr. Trump’s rage against the media is not by chance. The key to these types of illiberal, falsified democracies is the media.

— Miklós Haraszti

It can’t happen here in the United States, you may think, but it is already happening. This is the Rhyming Chaos podcast, where we interview people who have lived through or studied times of great change, when authoritarian rulers began to establish or abuse their power, or when old orders fell apart.

[Note: See Edward Luce, Trump is halfway to making America a police state, Financial Times, 15 April 2025.]

I’m your host, Jeremy Goldkorn, coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee. Today, I am delighted and humbled to be speaking to Miklós Harasti, a writer, journalist, human rights advocate, scholar, and erstwhile politician who was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Hungary, where he studied philosophy and literature at Budapest University. During the late 1960s, he belonged to a left-wing student organization that opposed the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. In 1976, he co-founded the Hungarian Democratic Opposition Movement. He participated in the negotiations on the transition to free elections in Hungary and then was a member of the Hungarian parliament from 1990 to 1994, after which he spent much of his time as a scholar and university professor, including at Columbia University in New York, which we will talk about, I think. He has served as a UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus and as the representative on freedom of the media for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Miklós’s books include A Worker in a Worker’s State [1977] and The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism [1987]. The Velvet Prison was introduced to me by Geremie Barmé, who was on the first episode of the Rhyming Chaos podcast. The book describes how the relaxation or state control of arts and culture in communist countries in the 90s did not actually bring greater freedom to the artists, but in fact was in some ways more effective than brute Stalinism in ensuring the obedience of the intellectual classes. The book helped me to understand how the apparent new freedoms of Chinese artists that I was mingling with in the 90s and early 2000s were in fact being made to serve as tools of the state. And the idea helps explain much of contemporary life in China, even now, including the gilded cage that business people and even ordinary citizens live in.

Now I fear in the United States, we’re starting to see the velvet prison being erected around us. I think you can see it on the front page of the New York Times and in what is happening at Columbia University in New York. And I fear things are going to get worse.

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Goldkorn

All right. Welcome to Rhyming Chaos, Miklós. I hope you will help us to understand what is happening to America right now.

Haraszti

I’m helping as much as I can, but I myself need some clarification.

Goldkorn

Well, I think we all do. So to start, I always had the idea in my head that Hungary was sort of the nice communist country. I mean, my father used to tell me that Hungarians had been fairly decent to Jews during the Second World War compared with many of the neighboring countries. The Hungarians seemed noble and brave to me for the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956 that opposed Soviet-style communism.

[Note: During the Cold War, Hungary was known as ‘the happiest barrack in the socialist camp’. — Ed.]

As a teenager, my head was turned by the novel In Praise of Older Woman by Stephen Vyszynski, and so on. And of course, you, Miklos, were a very important liberal politician in the years after communism. So it amazed and surprised me when Hungary took the illiberal turn that has happened under Orbán and the democratic backsliding. Can you talk a little bit about that? Was that something that you expected? What happened in Hungary?

Haraszti

Well, let me introduce the subject by my very sad amazement about these terms of history, because above all ideologies, in the years of the late 80s, early 90s, we were all mesmerized by Fukuyama’s theory of the End of History and the idea of constant piecemeal but continuous development towards something better. And this Cycles of History, the comeback of history itself, is a very sad surprise because at the time, for example, I wrote this book about the Velvet Prison — a book about how directed culture in late communism did work — then there came the unification of Hong Kong with Communist China, and my plan was — rather tongue-in-cheek — to go to Hong Kong and observe one more time, perhaps the last time, how a free country turns into an unfree one.

Goldkorn

So you were as naive as me in the 1990s.

Haraszti

Do a kind of diary because for sure the mighty People’s China would overwhelm the little and abandoned Hong Kong and then I can produce this diary. So, in my own country and in many countries actually, I see these cycles go around and now, at the end of my life, I will not be able to fit too many more experiences of this kind into my short life, historically speaking. Otherwise, I’m still optimistic because these are cycles, after all.

[Note: For more on the cycles of history, see 迴 The Tyranny of Chinese History and 旋 The Lugubrious Merry-go-round of Chinese Politics, a two-part chapter in Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium.]

Goldkorn

So even if you and I don’t necessarily see your return to a more liberal international order, maybe our children will.

Haraszti

Okay, let me start with that prophecy, okay? I believe that the eastern rim of Western civilization, or if you wish, the western rim of the former Soviet civilization, will see the light again. Maybe democracy now retreats to its original lands, but it will come again because, at least in Europe, we have these three layers of history: the Western, the Middle and the East. And even if it’s not several hundred years of experience of freedom like in the West, but in the Middle [Mitteleuropa — ed.], at least there has been at least 150 years of experimentation with democracy, which becomes the ‘flesh and blood’ of a nation, I can assure you.

So, this is the optimistic part. Otherwise, what happened in Hungary cannot be explained from the traditions and not even from the good beginnings as you have described them. It is an interplay of a very strong personality [that of Viktor Orbán] and the legal potential for Bonapartism in our country. It was a ‘lateral mistake’ — I myself was involved in [making] that mistake at that negotiating table with the Communist Party which prepared our first free elections [in 1990]. We installed an electoral system that was mimicking, aping, the Anglo-Saxon one in that it was very, very disproportional and didn’t have many guarantees [that is, checks and balances on power]. Almost as if we had been in Britain — with no constitution and a super disproportional system. And that is at odds for a new democracy, for any new democracy.

It was a very important lesson. Because social variety and the multi-centrism of political life ends up disappearing into a two-party system. And, because in Hungary, even minimal preconditions for preserving the liberalism of the institutions, and to pursue what was an otherwise well-designed constitution were missing, because of this, things turned out even worse than they might of in particular because of a strong personality like Viktor Orbán — a man who is a practicing Machiavellian — there has been a worse outcome for our country. What we have now is a country without any free national debate, with absolutely no radio station where you could have a debate; generally speaking, it is a country without debate. Parliament is a total rubber-stamp institution. There are no independent institutions providing oversight, either. Viktor Orbán has installed a system whereby his appointees can serve for nine years consecutively. If you don’t have a two-thirds majority in parliament it continues and you can’t elect a new one.

It is a total disgrace, as your president likes to say. And, at the moment, the only hope is that the various opposition parties can form a coalition and somehow muster a force that can match the ruling party’s electoral avalanche. This is necessary since Orbán has changed the electoral law several times from being one that was disproportional to one that is even more disproportional. So in the last elections, he won a 70% majority in parliament with only 30-40% of the votes. This is how disproportional it is and that explains everything.

Goldkorn

And that does sound rather familiar right now in the United States.

Haraszti

I was thinking about the parallel, and I can tell you that President Trump has invented an equivalent of the mechanism that Viktor Orbán installed in our country. If you have a disproportional electoral law and a unicameral parliament which decides everything [like in Hungary], Orbán can rule everything in a quasi-parliamentary democracy because one vote in his parliament is enough to change the constitution. And he has done that several times over the last fifteen years. The equivalent of such mechanism in Mr Trump’s hands is the litigation process that you have in your country. He can ignore courts; he can ignore rulings; he can ignore established mechanism and even the Constitution itself, because after a while litigation ends up in the Supreme Court, which is his. And that’s what will happen, he hopes. The thing that’s supposed to be the check and balance will, in fact, let him do what he wants instead of providing a check on his power.

The checks and balances in your constitutional system would work if the different institutions, the president’s office included, hold themselves to the established rules. But if they do not, then a very complicated litigation system is triggered, one that ends up in the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court in the United States will work [in ways similar to] as the unicameral supermajority in Hungary’s parliament. It basically approves what the president does because it is the president who appointed the justices.

Goldkorn

Right.

Haraszti

The point is that he can afford to ignore the established checks and balances. And the final result is the same as what we have in Hungary. I heard, as daresay you have, that over the last few years Viktor Orbán played the role of something like a tutor for Trumpism, teaching his method of how to transform the country from top down with the help of the machinery of the state. This is the basic lesson that Orbán has taught Trump’s people. It does not hold out any good promise.

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Goldkorn

I saw an interview with you that was, I think, done in 2011 in which you said that Hungary had become the first fully fledged illiberal democracy in the European Union. You blamed or you referred to the systematic removal of checks and balances. When did you become aware that this was happening in Hungary? What were the first signs that things were going along this path?

Haraszti

Well, actually, there is a first moment in which you could notice that. Viktor Orbán was in opposition for eight years before his takeover in 2010 and the very first law — a very thick package of laws about the media, in fact — which he had in ready-made form, was tabled in parliament. From the very first moment it was a total takeover and very important. Similarly, Mr Trump’s rage against the media is not by chance.

The key to these types of illiberal, falsified democracies is the media. So, Orbán established a five-member board [that had control] over all media in the country, solely delegated by his party, and a total dictatorship over media licensing and, crucially, over de-licensing as well.

Very early after 2010 we ended up in a country where there is absolutely no legacy media which the opposition could use. There is one print daily where opposition can appear. There is no TV and no radio where opposition can appear. It’s solely online where the opposition can have a voice. Of course, there is constant encroachment on the online media as well.

Goldkorn

Is there an attempt to actually censor the internet in the way that China does, in Hungary at the moment? Or has that not happened yet?

Haraszti

I think the membership of the European Union does count in this respect. There are constant efforts to constrain, to ban this and that. But basically, it does work. The greatest danger over the online media is actually a financial one. Because the indescribably vast universe of propaganda machinery controlled by Viktor Orbán is freely available to the public, while obviously the independent online media has to be paid for by users. So crowdfunding is in constant crisis, plus the editorial boards of the independent media themselves are not on the top of the game when it comes to [the use of] paywalls. They create separate paywalls in competition with one another and that does not bode well.

Obviously, long ago, they should have invented somehow a common pool of financing, which they don’t do because of their lag [in perception], because they only slowly came to understand that we are not living in a democracy anymore. They simply thought that they could do their job as other normal journalists do in any other normal European country, that is to maintain their independence and pursue quality journalism. But [what we have now] it cannot contribute to a public opinion. The way they are going about things means that they cannot create a universe [that reveals] unknown knowledge. Even if they occasionally publish wonderful investigative journalism, it disappears behind a paywall.

Goldkorn

Nobody’s reading it. At least intellectuals, maybe, or concerned people, but ordinary people are not going to see it.

Haraszti

Well, it’s difficult to define what one means by ‘ordinary people’; you can define it geographically and in terms of income. Take the countryside — the small villages in the ‘archipelago’ of Hungary — all you have there is legacy [state-controlled] media, free-to-air media. There all you get is propaganda and even more propaganda. You are presented with a totally binary world of good vs. bad. The government is good, the opposition bad. Things would still be okay if opposition news was somehow really available, but all you get is libellous untruth and fake news.

Goldkorn

How far does the sort of oppression of free expression and thought extend? I mean, you’re in Hungary in your country house. Are you ever worried that armed men will come to your door and take you away? Or how much velvet is there in your Hungarian prison right now?

Haraszti

Wonderful question. It’s better than the erstwhile prison of late-liberal communism. But please take that adjective ‘illiberal’ seriously. It’s a purposely falsified form of democracy, one in which two-thirds of parliament is more powerful than [when the] the Communists had 100% power. It is almighty. They simply don’t need armed men sent to opposition houses.

Media is the very first thing to go, then they come to realign the economy and soft nationalisation in the hands of the government and its chosen oligarchs, all the key players. So beware of the oligarchs under Trumpism. Because he too doesn’t need to send armed people either. It’s simply enough if the economy is controlled by people who are in his service.

Goldkorn

It’s like the line from The Godfather, you know: ‘It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.’

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Haraszti

Very much so. So it is the art of how to suppress any kind of possibility of innovation in a country where you still have a multi-owner economy and nominally multi-party democracy in parliament. And those opposition parties are really there. The only trouble is that they are totally fragmented. Even after ten years they cannot unite; they cannot fully appreciate the fact that even if they are fractured into left-wing, right-wing or green, they still have a common denominator, something called democracy. They believe that they should carry on business like other democracies [instead of forming a united opposition and it results in] a very powerful inhibition that is used by the illiberal ruler of the country. Now, ultimately, the checks and balances — and there’s the [presidential] term limit in the US — do not exist in my country. So that’s also a very powerful factor: the fact that the renewal of democracy that should come about almost automatically as the result of a term limit [and the change of ruler or government] does not exist in our European parliamentary democracy.

Goldkorn

Right. Well, I’m not that confident that it’s going to prove to be a check or a balance in this country, to be honest. I mean, it might not be Donald Trump. Maybe it’s his son, Barron. But I feel as though we’re being set up for a long term rule by the current regime. Talking about oligarchs, is there anyone who’s roughly equivalent to Elon Musk in Hungary?

Haraszti

There is one. It is the childhood pal of Viktor Orbán from the same humble village [of Felcsút]. His name is Lőrinc Mészáros [aka ‘Orbán’s wallet’]. Over a five year period, he became Hungary’s grandee in terms of financial might, the country’s richest person. It is just taken for granted, a simple reality. Nobody needs to investigate that he is just a strawman for Orbán. His former neighbour … It appears that this Mészáros fellow is enriching Orbán’s family by constantly transferring assets to it.

It’s important to understand that such corruption relies on nepotism. So point is… Yes, we have an oligarch who is an equivalent of Musk, even thought he’s not the wealthiest person in the world but, he’s like your Mr Musk, in Hungary he owns all relevant businesses.

Goldkorn

Right. Sounds, what you describe, is sort of like, in China, they call it a ‘white glove’ [白手套, a middleman who launders the ill-gotten gains of the power holders]. He’s the person who enables Orbán to be extremely rich without having to technically own anything.

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Haraszti

It’s actually a farce. Parliamentarians have to declare their wealth every year, you know, and Orbán is the one with the least assets in the whole political class. So it is almost kind of black humor on his part, you know, just defying your credulence by declaring zero assets, while his family is indescribably rich. His daughters, his son-in-law, his wife, his father, all of them are billionaires out of nowhere. You know, out of nowhere while he declares zero assets. And this cynical black humor is what you have to live with instead of clarity and instead of transparency.

Goldkorn

Right. It’s the guy with two cents in the bank account, but his wife has a gold toilet and a yacht.

Haraszti

And even a gold toilet brush.

Goldkorn

So why do you think the American right has fallen in love with Viktor Orbán? Is it just because they see him as a model for how to rule and pillage the country? I didn’t know, I’m not really amazed by anything anymore, but for a while I couldn’t understand how people who had previously been apparently against the kind of values that Orbán represented have fallen so far in love with him.

Haraszti

I’m sorry, what part you don’t understand? How Orbán could change or how can Trump love him?

Goldkorn

Well, what the American right saw in Orban, I guess.

Haraszti

I believe the most enticing part of Orbán’s teachings is how to handle cultural rule. Because the greatest sorrow of the Trumpians is the power of the free press, is the power of civil society, is the power of the tradition of criticism. Orbán found a way to fight that — in two words it is ‘from above’. Because all right-wing, all previous right-wing points on the spectrum tried to fight the soft power of the intelligentsia from below, one by one, or by debate, or whatever. But it doesn’t work. Debate remains. And what is painful for the Trumpians is debate itself. So how to eliminate debate? The way to do it is from above, with the help of state power. You have to conquer the top of the state and from there you proceed downwards to suppress variety and suppress criticism. That’s where Orbán’s example is very powerful.

Goldkorn

Right. That makes sense. You taught at Columbia University in New York, and I don’t know how closely you’ve been following the developments there. What do you make of what’s happening at Columbia University?

Haraszti

Well, in my time, which was the very beginning of the 10s, so it was 2010 and ’11, up to ’14, I had a course that actually joined course with President Bollinger about free speech, and he was the light, and I was the shadow, because he educated about the First Amendment in America. And I taught about censorship in the world. But these times now are different. Actually, I think what is going on in the universities over the last number of years has not been positive. So the Trumpians can, in my opinion, suppress a certain variation of the left wing, suppress free speech. And that is very, very handily usable by the Trumpians to suppress variety, this time fully or this time to totally control what is going on there, as we see in the news. The disappointment, which I think, understandably, is present in many observers. Actually, what happened during the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli Hamas conflict rather reminded me very much of the Cultural Revolution of China in 1966, was not positive at all. So maybe, if you wish, and you don’t like this for your own, you can practice, but what happened there in Columbia now, in the universities now, exactly as I said, using state power to suppress independence and autonomy of universities it is using or misusing something that was not positive itself.

Goldkorn

I think this is one of the keys to understanding what has been happening in the United States.

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Haraszti

The way they do it is exactly the Orbán way, using state power to deprive universities of their autonomy, which is a very important issue in Hungary. With the exception of very few universities already succeeding, the way Orban does it is to move state universities into private hands, into hands of foundations as curators, the members of which are, of course, named by him. And for good. And then it’s said, you want autonomy? The curatorial groups [that have been put in charge of the universities] will be fully autonomous, and they will define in the future who will be their successor. So they are in Orbánist hands for good. The European Union is fighting that method and it has deprived Hungary of some funding over the issue of the autonomy of universities. But it’s an ongoing fight. But certainly what Trump did after the actually inconvenient movements in universities and misusing those who misused university autonomy is following the war. [That is, Trump’s White House has taken advantage of the post-7 October 2023 protests at universities, which it sees as the abuse of autonomous university governance as an excuse to abuse universities in its own way.]

[Note: For a discussion of this issue elsewhere in Contra Trump, see Like the devil, vampires, and the more timid varieties of ghost, fascism must be invited in.]

Goldkorn

Just to drill down on that, I mean, what you’re talking about is that American universities, famously now, there was a kind of a, I mean, on the right wing, they’d call it like ‘woke censorship’, I suppose. There was an atmosphere where certain points of view were not welcome because they didn’t fit with a certain left-leaning ideology. And this was, in fact, a bad thing for academic freedom.

It was intimidating. And, you know, I mean, one example, I suppose, of that mindset was the firing of Ian Buruma, who was the editor of The New York Review of Books, because he had dared to publish a piece by a guy who had been accused of sexual harassment.

[Note: See Ed Pilkington, Ex-New York Review of Books editor: I was ‘convicted on Twitter’ over essay, The Guardian, 20 September 2018.]

And people on the right wing will come comparing that to the Cultural Revolution in China. And, you know, there was some justification for that. So that was bad. And this has then been seized upon by the Trumpists as a justification for a much more serious crackdown on freedom of academic inquiry and expression. Am I understanding correctly what you’re saying?

Haraszti

Very much so. In Hungary, you didn’t have such a terror of the “left”, quote-unquote. You didn’t have any kind of intimidation. It was simply universities, academia as its best, with all kinds of research work. And actually, after a decade of Orbánism, universities have remained a kind of island of keen observation, of fresh research. But he just didn’t want to have that, so he used state power to forcibly move universities into the hands of the private foundations that he created. And the playbook of that method, again, one in which you use state power from above to suppress unwanted variety in society, is what is being used under Trump.

Goldkorn

Right. Can we go back to, you talked about how the opposition parties and politicians in Hungary are sort of, they’re not united. They have ideological differences, political differences, and those differences sort of get in the way of them actually uniting against the illiberal urbanists. And that seems to me to be quite similar to what’s happening inside the Democratic Party in that you have a lot of politicians who are still operating under the assumptions that this is a normal democracy and that their behavior should be similar to the behavior a decade or two ago, and that they can use the institutions of the American democratic system to pursue their aims. And it’s preventing them from being able to actually do anything effective. Does that make sense? And you talk a little bit more about how that dynamic operates in Hong Kong.

Haraszti

We first have to return again to the question of the electoral system, because the Anglo-Saxon electoral system, which is a majoritarian system, one which in practice produces a two-party system, instead of a multi-party system and the most to cut coalitions and a variety of different audiences expressed via the party system, that doesn’t exist in Hungary either. The problem is that, as I told you, and I am partly culpable for that, as part of the team that negotiated the transition to democracy in 1989-90, we have installed the disproportional system, which practically is a two-party system. But if you still have very varied and fragmented opposition, then it’s just a domination of one party, which can unite, the ruling party.

So I believe that, especially in the US, where you nevertheless still have term limits, and you know that you will get a chance in four years’ time to do something with the help of the other party, at least. There, a decisive factor, because of the nature of modern media, is the figure of the leading personality. It’s about having a leading, uniting personality. And yeah, I know that the far left of the Democratic Party and the mainstream of the Democrats cannot agree, which weakens that party. But what really weakens that party is that it lacks one uniting personality. And that was very clearly the case with the presidency of Biden. That was painful. But all conditions still exist, and I believe that the Democratic Party can do much better if they find a uniting personality. It is in the US, under US conditions, in my observation, is a much more important question than the fragmentation within the public.

Politics is driven by charisma and the Democratic Party is, I mean, maybe there’s Bernie Sanders or AOC, but I mean, they don’t have a Barack Obama right now and that is the problem. You have to have somebody who is a uniting figure, he or she must come from the future, not from the past. And they’ve got to look good on TV.

It’s funny that we are going back, you know, to the farthest time in that respect. Modern media brings us back to the beginnings of politics. Yeah, you have to shine.

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Goldkorn

All right, let me ask you one last question, Miklós. What’s your advice for Americans now?

Haraszti

It’s too immodest of me to pretend that I have an advice. Certainly, America has been an inspiration for our generation of democratisers. But there’s the classic European electoral system — the kind of proportional electoral system or multi-party democracy in which it is difficult to form and easy to dissolve a government, one in which there are coalitions and compromises. In other post-communist countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania or Bulgaria, there is also a certain ‘vulnerability to dictators’, but they fail to get into power because the electoral system forces coalitions and does not allow for their total victory, unlike the disproportionate electoral system [in Hungary].

Sorry for going on so much about this, but institutions do count and constitutions do count. So my point is, first you have somehow to defeat Trump and then think about the great lessons to do with this experiment with illiberalism. And even on the brink of dictatorship in your great country, you have to think about reform, how to move in a more Canadian direction in regards to the two-party system. Such a system creates effective problems for dictators.

Goldkorn

Miklós, it’s truly been my honor to talk to you. And thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us, unfortunately, about rather grim topics.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by me, Jeremy Goldkorn, and edited by Kadra Skrutz. The theme music is Eric Satie’s Shimnopedi No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei.

Our cover art is by Li Yin Fei. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com. Thank you, Miklos.

Haraszti

Thank you, Jeremy.

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Source:

• Falsified democracy in Hungary and America, Rhyming Chaos, 31 March 2025. The transcript of this conversation has been edited for clarity. Notes, explications within the text, which are marked by square brackets, and illustrative material have been added by China Heritage.

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